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The Ludovico technique

I am a skeptic by nature, at least for all things I have not accepted with my usual scrutiny and errors. Deep skepticism on some issues had rewarded me well with new paths to understand truth. With human drama things get complicated. But a few things I have learned suggest that quite often power behind political formations think very differently from their adherent members. It is considered generally to be extremely antisemitic to provoke the account of the Holocaust. There are I think philosemitic reasons to ask for some better understanding of what happened. It seems quite possible that the Zionist leadership had strategic interests in doctoring some part of this history. Winners of wars write history, and they write history with political aims in mind. I think one of the most interesting ways in which it becomes possible to understand the issue of possible propaganda excesses of the Second World War is by the imaginative reflection of Stanley Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange, the Ludovico technique for forced watching of scenes of violence under a drugged state. Conditioning by propaganda is the norm of any state but in this case there is a excess that is different, the belief that one’s people were literally the target of extermination. All sorts of people have made gestures of extermination, including the right wing rabbi Dov Lior with respect to Gaza quite recently. I have not yet succeeded in making sense of whether there was an actual extermination attempt by the Nazis yet. I have seen evidence of mass deaths in concentration camps and the rest of the showcase which do suggest severe oppression, ethnic cleansing etc. but one has one’s own sense of the border between the horrific truth and the possible doctoring to useful population control propaganda. I don’t think the fictional imaginary Ludovico technique is a solid basis for any significant understanding but it is potent as an artistic view of the possible. Needless to say I don’t ‘hate the Jews’ which seems to be one of the favorite knee-jerk reactions (although I do note that ‘you hate the Palestinians’ has not quite gathered the same level of perceived effectiveness). Long live good-and-evil stories that people can live by.